From Internal Tool to Product: How Graphite Discovered Product-Market Fit by Solving Their Own Problem

Sometimes the best products come from solving your own problems first. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers revealed how Graphite’s journey from internal tool to successful product offers lessons in recognizing and seizing market opportunities.

The Original Plan In March 2020, Tomas made what seemed like a risky move. “I remember very vividly that week, my manager was like, you know, there’s like, some very strange things happening in the world. You sure you want to leave the company?” he recalls. His response was unwavering: “You can’t retain me. I’m going to go start this company.”

The initial vision wasn’t about code review at all. As Tomas explains, “We started actually at a different company entirely… worked on mobile, infra at Facebook. I left, I was like, there’s a lot of space to do this out in the world for other startups.” They hired former teammates and began building mobile infrastructure tools.

The Accidental Product Being Facebook engineers, they naturally wanted good internal tooling. “Facebook had a lot of really good tooling around code review, and we don’t really have that out here,” Tomas shares. What started as an internal necessity became their CLI, then a website, and eventually a complete platform.

The Market Signal The pivotal moment came in summer 2021 when Fabricator, a code review platform, announced its shutdown. Tomas noticed something interesting in Facebook alumni chats: “What we saw in a lot of Facebook alumni chats was people being like, ‘yo, Fabricator shutting down. I really don’t want to use GitHub. I don’t think they’re great for code review of closed source projects. What are people doing?'”

The Opportunity At this point, Graphite was still focused on their original business. “At the time, we’re working on something else entirely. And we’re like, ‘hey, we have this tooling. Does anyone want it?'” Tomas recalls. Their initial thought was to open source it or write a white paper.

But the market had other ideas. “What we ended up with was we ended up with a lot of people at very large companies being like, ‘I absolutely want this, and I’d actually rather that you all host it,'” Tomas shares. The feedback was clear: companies wanted a managed solution, not another open source project to maintain.

The Validation They decided to test the waters with a small group. “We’ll take 20 people, we’ll put them onto this platform we have internally,” Tomas explains. But demand exceeded their modest plans: “We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, ‘I absolutely need this tool.'”

The numbers kept growing organically. By November 2021, they had 68 users before even launching their waitlist. When they did launch the waitlist, expecting 500 signups, they received 3,500 instead.

The Evolution Today, with approximately 2,000 weekly active users, Graphite has evolved far beyond its internal tool origins. Their vision has expanded to democratizing the development practices of tech giants. As Tomas describes it, “What we really want to do is we want to bring the speed that these big companies can iterate and develop with and the safety and quality that they get from that too… and provide that to everyone.”

For B2B founders, Graphite’s journey offers valuable lessons in product discovery: sometimes the most promising opportunities come from solving your own problems well, staying alert to market signals, and being willing to pivot when user demand points in an unexpected direction.